Wolfgang von Kempelen

Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 to 1804) was a Hungarian writer, architect, engineer and inventor, born in Pressburg, today Bratislava, who had a long career as a civil servant of the Habsburg court. He is known for The Turk, a chess playing automaton presented to Maria Theresa of Austria in 1770, which his source describes as a hoax: a human chess master hidden inside the cabinet worked the figure by levers, so the machine was an elaborate simulation of mechanical automation. He also built a speaking machine. His place in this atlas is as the maker of an early and celebrated chess machine, remembered in the history of game playing machines though it did not itself play.